In a way, business is like sports: The organizations with the best talent nearly always win.

The challenge is finding those superstars and convincing them to join your team. To recruit effectively, it takes creativity, dedication, and a firm commitment to quality.

Unfortunately, most companies approach hiring the same way they have for decades. Roles are posted, résumés are screened, candidates are interviewed, and a final candidate is selected. There might be an occasional A-player who fortuitously enters the recruitment life cycle, but by and large, this archaic method only produces average talent.

This traditional way of recruiting is also time-consuming and onerous, which is detrimental to landing the most sought-after candidates. Indeed, the highest performers are generally available for fewer than 10 days. There’s simply not enough time to post an opportunity to an oversaturated job board and then wade through a slew of unqualified résumés to end up with only a few legitimate possibilities.

If landing the most qualified workers is so paramount for thriving in this global marketplace — and it is — why do most organizations keep perpetuating this status-quo process? Could it be that recruiting departments are primarily focused on delivering candidates at the lowest possible cost? Could it be that recruiters are catering to the wrong customers?

In this era of one-click shopping, same-day delivery, customer reviews, and social media, it’s time for companies to reimagine their hiring processes and create a world-class candidate experience that will keep them competitive.

The “Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research Report” points out that as many as 80 percent of candidates will share a positive experience with their inner circle, defined as close friends, significant others or spouses, and colleagues. More than 60 percent will share negative experiences with the same group. Percentages decrease when it comes to social media, but they remain significant with 51 percent sharing positive experiences and 35 percent opening up about negative ones.

More importantly, though, according to CandE Awards research, nearly half of candidates who ranked their job seeker experience as one-star reported that they would take their alliance and product purchases elsewhere. For those with a five-star experience, almost three-quarters would not only apply to work at the company again, but they would also refer others and make purchases with the company when applicable — and 85 percent of these individuals weren’t even hired.

1. Treat Candidates Like Customers

Some of the most palpable qualities of an excellent candidate experience are speed, transparency, and communication. To do this effectively, show candidates at the outset what they can expect in their recruitment journey. Be upfront about what’s coming, how long it will take, and what they can expect at each step in the process. Candidates also want to be able to track this in real time (just like they can do when placing an order with Amazon, Wayfair, etc.) so they’re not left in the dark for weeks or months on end.

Johnson & Johnson is a prime example of a company doing this right. The organization highlights exactly what to expect during the application process and provides updates at each stage. It has also partnered with The Muse to provide helpful articles and resources to help candidates prepare and succeed at each step of the process.

2. Remove All Friction

Put yourself in your candidate’s shoes. Would you enjoy uploading a résumé only to then be asked to fill out a dozen more fields about your employment history? Then, why are you requiring so many non-essential steps to the application process? Cut out as much as you can and then watch your completion rates explode. For example, AT&T removed half of the fields on its application, and over the next two years, it experienced a 20 percent increase in the number of applicants.

Also, stop sending five emails back and forth just to synchronize your calendars. Instead, use a scheduling application like Calendly to make the process more efficient.

Lastly, reduce the number of interviews conducted. Each candidate doesn’t need to meet eight different people. In fact, Google conducted an exhaustive study and found that the magic number of interviews is four. Hiring managers who conduct four interviews will make the same decision at least 90 percent of the time as managers who conduct more than four. The key is to create a small team of experienced interviewers who have a proven ability to assess the intrinsic factors required for succeeding in a particular role within your organization.

3. Survey Candidates at Every Stage

The most effective way to learn how you can improve your candidate experience is by asking your customers about their journey at every step of the way. Ask them how long it took to complete the application or what they liked best about the interview process. Did they have an enjoyable on-site visit? What could be improved in the offer and negotiation stages? For a comprehensive list of questions, Talent Board is a great resource.

Finally, get an idea of each candidate’s overall satisfaction by determining his or her Net Promoter Score. To do this, ask how likely he or she is to recommend that a friend apply for a job with your company.

4. Close the Loop Quickly

Too many candidates never hear back from employers for months after applying, even when they’ve spent hours preparing their résumé, conducting interviews, taking time off work for an on-site visit, etc. That’s atrocious service and wildly disrespectful.

When you decide a candidate is not the right fit, contact him or her directly within 48 hours. To create advocates, go above and beyond the current status quo by providing honest feedback about why he or she wasn’t the best fit for the role. Sometimes the best way to do this is by simply highlighting the additional preferred experience that was lacking. Additionally, you could point the candidate toward resources that could close the skill gap, such as online courses, certificates, educational bootcamps, etc. Lastly, encourage him or her to apply again after applying your advice.

In this age of transparency and constant communication, organizations of the modern era must reinvent their recruitment processes to deliver world-class candidate experiences — or they’ll fall victims to those that do. Treat your hiring practice as a revenue generator. Your bottom line will thank you!

Behind each of Google’s iconic products are some of the most brilliant people on the planet. Their perennial dominance leaves no question that their greatest asset really is their people! But how do they continually hire the best? What’s their secret?

Fortunately, we no longer have to guess. Thanks to two incredible new books, one by their Executive Chairman, Erich Schmidt, called How Google Works, and the other by their former SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, called Work Rules!(Note: this is by far the greatest book on HR/Talent I’ve ever read), we now have a very detailed understanding of the magic behind Google’s hiring practices.

Thus, over the course of several articles, we’ll dissect each part of Google’s recruiting process and discover what makes it so extraordinary!

To start, we’ll highlight the three overarching principles that define their culture: mission, transparency, and voice.

Mission

Google’s mission is purposefully simple, broad, and absent of commonly used corporate jargon: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Notice how there is no mention of shareholders, profits, or customers. Instead, it’s focused on something much more universal and enduring, something moral, rather than economic. This gives Googlers’ work intrinsic meaning and significance, which spurs motivation and perseverance. Co-founder, Sergey Brin, summarizes it this way: “talented people are attracted to Google because we empower them to change the world.”

Google’s mission is also impossible to achieve. There will always be more information to be organized and new ways to make it accessible. Thus, Google believes that a good mission statement serves as a compass, not a destination. It continually inspires employees to press in, never settle, and always keep creating.

Transparency

At Google, nearly everything is open for observation, questioning, and debate. Transparency is paramount! For example, consider how their code base – the collection of all their source code – is shared with every employee, even those on their first day. They also release the details of every company project and its results, invite anyone to ask questions directly of the CEO, and share the same presentation used at Board meetings with every team member.

The reasons for having this radically transparent workplace are many: it reduces duplication across the organization, increases accountability, drives healthy competition, and communicates to employees that they are valued and trusted. Collectively, these outcomes significantly strengthen engagement and overall performance.

Voice

Google believes that every employee is brilliant and has valuable ideas to contribute. They think that everyone should have a voice about how things are run. This is a dramatic turn from the bureaucratic cultures so dominant across corporate America where significant strategic decisions are exclusively reserved for senior leaders.

In practice, having a voice means that hiring decisions are made by committees (more on that inStep 4), managers are reviewed by employees, people can move to new teams to pursue projects that they’re more passionate about, and everyone is invited to weigh in on how to improve processes and culture, to name a few examples.

Yet, giving every Googler a voice is more than just the right thing to do; it’s also highly pragmatic. In a hyper-competitive market where the world’s most gifted people are being pursued by multiple companies simultaneously, firms that give their employees an opportunity to shape the destiny of their organizations have a distinct competitive advantage.

With this in mind, leaders that are focused on re-vamping their recruiting efforts should begin by ensuring that they have a clear, simple and inspiring mission, a culture of transparency, and an environment where everyone has a voice. This is the first step to world-class hiring!

By 2013, Google was adding nearly 5,000 people to their organization every year. To keep up with the pace, they could no longer rely on referrals as their only source of smart creatives. Their internal networks seemed to have been completely tapped out.

So, like others, Google began leveraging job boards. This was great at getting applicants, but now they were having to sort through over 400 resumes before they found a single superstar worthy of an offer. In perspective, this meant that it was twenty-five times more likely to get accepted into Harvard than it was to get hired by Google.

Part of the reason for the astonishingly low hire rate was due to the limitations of the portals themselves. Top performers, by virtue of them excelling in their positions, were very unlikely to actively pursue new opportunities on their own (at least at this point in Google’s history). Because of this, most of the candidates that applied via job boards were completely unqualified.

Still, much of Google’s extreme selectivity was intentional. They were simply unwilling to compromise on quality just to fill jobs. Laszlo Bock, former SVP of People Operations, explains: “Our hiring machine was overly conservative by design. It focused on avoiding false positives – the people who looked good in the interview process but actually would not perform well – because we would rather have missed hiring two great performers if it meant we would also avoid hiring a lousy one. A small company can’t afford to hire someone who turns out to be awful.”

The drawback with this approach, however, was that it slowed the hiring process down to a near halt. In fact, many of the best candidates would remove themselves from the recruitment cycle because it took too long, was too onerous, or they didn’t feel adequately pursued.

Facing these challenges, Google was forced to get more creative. Thankfully, after years of trial and error, they’ve now settled on an incredibly efficient process that consistently recruits the top talent on the planet.

Let’s dive in and explore this process by first highlighting the top four ways in which Google consistently finds and attracts superstars. Then, in Step 4, we’ll outline their innovative methods for interviewing, screening, and selecting the best.

Aided Recall

In the early years, as mentioned, Google almost exclusively relied on referrals for filling open roles. Personal recommendations were simply the best way to generate quality leads. Thus, after experiencing the aforementioned challenges with job portals, they decided to go back and find new ways to garner more referrals.

Eventually, they adopted a technique called “aided recall,” which is often used in the marketing world to test audience’s memory retention of advertisements. In that industry, subjects are first asked if they remember seeing a particular advertisement. Then, with the help of a verbal or visual aid, they are asked again. With this small nudge, the respondents’ recollection almost always improves.

Similarly, Google started using this method to jog the memory of their employees about people in their network that may be great referrals. Laszlo Bock describes it this way: “People tend to have a few people who are top of mind. But they rarely do an exhaustive review of all the people they know, nor do they have perfect knowledge of all the open jobs available. We increased the volume of referrals by more than one-third by jogging people’s memories just as marketers do. For example, we asked Googlers whom they would recommend for specifics roles: ‘Who is the best finance person you ever work with?’ ‘Who is the best developer in the Ruby programming language.’…Breaking down a huge question (‘Do you know anyone we should hire?’) into lots of small, manageable ones (‘Do you know anyone who would be a good salesperson in New York?’) garners us more, higher-quality referrals.”

Another way Google uses this technique is by initiating what they call “Sourcing Jams,” in which groups of twenty or thirty people get together for several hours and methodically go through all of their LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ contacts, identifying anyone that may be an excellent referral. Once a potential candidate is identified, recruiters who are on standby immediately reach out to them and begin a relationship.

These two tactics have produced more than 100,000 employee referrals in a single year.

Map, Pursue, Cultivate

In addition to aided recall, Google also uses a tool called market mapping. It works like this: First, working closely with senior leaders, the People Operations team gets a solid understanding of where the company is headed strategically. Then, armed with this information, they outline current talent gaps and those that they may have in the future. Next, they go into the market and systematically locate and “map” every person within a universe of job types, companies, and industries that meet what they’re looking for.

Once a comprehensive list is generated, recruiters review portions of it with other Googlers who have expertise in that area or may know those individuals. They then check online to see if there’s anything else that could help identify those who would be most successful at the organization. Finally, they reach out and begin building a relationship.

Once contact is made, the hard work of cultivation begins. Patience is key. Sometimes it takes many years to finally recruit a best-in-class candidate. In fact, many of Google’s finest employees joined the organization only after they had been pursued for more than 10 consecutive years.

Engage Inbounds

As Google’s global awareness and success skyrocketed, so too did the number of quality applicants that came through their career site. In fact, their explosive growth drastically mitigated the amount of poor inbound leads they had experienced earlier with job portals.

Yet, unlike most career sites that are outdated, uninspiring, and have little utility, Google invested millions into building one of the most robust, engaging, and effective career sites in the world. Instead of just posting job descriptions online and waiting for a flood of applicants, Google encourages candidates to invite Googlers to their Google+ “circles” so that current employees can get a more holistic understanding (via photos, skill profiles, previous posts, and other personal content) of who they are, what they do best, and what they’re most passionate about. It’s not uncommon for applicants to chat directly with employees over Google Video as a first point of contact. They’re encouraged to ask questions about the company culture, the role, and the team.

Also, if a candidate isn’t selected for the position to which he/she applied, recruiters now have an easy way to cultivate relationships and reach out later when more suitable opportunities arise.

Hire Teams

When the referral pipeline runs dry, the pursue and cultivate process isn’t as expeditious as needed, and/or the career site isn’t generating a sufficient volume of quality inbound leads, the best option may be to recruit entire teams of people at a time. Although this sounds extraordinarily expense, it doesn’t have to be. In fact, sometimes this can be the least expensive solution.

For example, several years ago Google knew about a team in Denmark that had revolutionized the speed at which Web browsers ran. They had sold their company and were now exploring future opportunities. Microsoft reached out to them and offered everyone jobs, so long as they relocated to Redmond, WA. Google got wind of this and instead offered them an opportunity to stay in their hometown, thereby opening the first Google office in Denmark. They accepted and in the end, this investment paid off handsomely. The team went on to build the JavaScript in Chrome.

Aided Recall. Map, Pursue, Cultivate. Engage Inbounds. Hire Teams. These are the top four ways in which Google sources the top talent in the world. But how, then, do they interview, screen, and select the crème de la crème? What’s their process? Find out in the article Google’s Guide to Assessing and Selecting the Word’s Top Talent